Gtd Weekly Planning

[Cary Polachek]

Tryingto make a routine can be so overwhelming. I have a big family, so that comes with a pretty big routine! LOL! I will be bookmarking this a going to be using it as a reference to start a better weekly routine for me and my family. The way it is broken down really helps everything seem so simple!

Such great tips! I do a lot of these but have a tough time keeping up with it every week especially if things get crazy with schedules. Cleaning off the counter is such a vital tip too! Declutter your space so you can focus on what needs to be focused on! Thanks for sharing all these amazing tips!

On Monday mornings I plan the upcoming work week. I capture this plan in an e-mail and send it to myself so that I will be sure to see it and have access to it daily. (See the snapshot above of some recent plans in my inbox.)

This planning can take a long time; almost always longer than an hour. But the return on investment is phenomenal. To visualize your whole week at once allows you to spread out, batch, and prioritize work in a manner that significantly increases what you accomplish and goes a long way toward eliminating work pile-ups and late nights (the latter being crucial if you practice fixed-schedule productivity).

This plan adopts a different format. Because this was a summer week with no major appointments, meetings, or other scheduled obligations to break up my days (so rare, yet so wonderful), I could base my schedule around some simple heuristics: three hours a day on deep work for research, and a list of small things to schedule each day into the time that remains.

Thanks for this article, Cal. I am starting medical school this week and this article is just what I needed. As opposed to undergrad where time was more abundant, med school is going to require some very strict planning!

(1) If I get on a roll with a deep thought, or wander into a productive conversation, I identify this as a good reason to bust the current schedule. When I next come up for breath, I can then fix the schedule. Usually this requires that I fix both my daily and the weekly schedule to compensate. I never mind doing this as spontaneous breakthroughs are part of my makes this job fun. On other hand, there are certain things that I do not usually allow me to bust my schedule, namely, low-value behaviors or other sources of procrastination.

I am trying to figure out how this applies to me. I simply have a queue of work that I go through in priority order each day. Sometimes I have a deadline but not often so I track it in my head. I have appointments occasionally which go on my calendar and any time not spent in an appoinment goes towards my work queue. Is there a way I can benefit from more planning? Because I have trouble seeing it.

For some reason your RSS feed for posts is not discovered by Firefox. The only way I found it was by manually trying the likely URL calnewport.com/blog/feed. You might want to fix this somehow to make it easy for people to subscribe.

Great one Cal, and I have to agree with you. A few months ago I started scheduling everything into my week as I was struggling with my many commitments. I have found that my stress levels have plummeted as I have scheduled everything, which includes time to exercise, meditate, eat well and leisure time. I am coming to believe that scheduling proper leisure time is one of the keys to increasing creativity as I have my best ideas when I am walking in the mountains or playing with my daughter! For years I would notice that after a weekend away or some time in nature I would have good ideas, but never took the time to prioritize these activities into my week.

This may be a silly question, but why do you have a morning, afternoon and evening edition? Is this the actual time you actually get your weekly plan done, or do you mix it up on purpose? Thanks for the good ideas.

Quick question: what I find difficult is finding something that I can do in the evenings to relax and unwind. What do you do in the evenings that you enjoy doing to unwind and reset for the next day? In the spirit of study hacks- the more specific the better.

I am working full time and wanting to study fulltime (I have other addtional out side activites to maintain as well) I have spoken to peole and many advise against this. They have said ultimately either the work or the grades wil suffer when the going gets tough.

As it turned out, the install had some impossible-to-anticipate side effects, and it was late Friday afternoon before the final, QA version was shipped. Everything else planned for the week got done, including two extra hours on my deep focus refactoring project, and I kept my week down to 45 hours, but I had to slide parts of the task chain over other parts to make it work.

I think writing out a narrative for the week is a very interesting technique. I started doing it after reading this post and it actually makes a lot of sense. It reminds me much of a trick used in sports where you would imagine the outcome of a situation beforehand. For example, when I was playing ice-hockey, one situation I would think about a lot was coming up and scoring the perfect goal or making a perfect tackle of the attacker. So by making a narrative rather than lists, you are imagining more concrete way to the outcomes rather than just listing them.

Planning the week ahead is definitely a great way to have a proactive life. However, the key things is how we can validate that plan is good or not?

I also do think that there is no permanent plan for all weeks. We should somehow adjust the plan according to reality.

This site is the online home for the computer science professor and bestselling author Cal Newport. Here you can learn more about Cal and both his general-audience and academic writing. You can also browse and subscribe to his long-running weekly essay series. For more on Cal's podcast, videos, and online courses, please visit his media portal, TheDeepLife.com

By definition, weekly planning is the set of activities you do every week for yourself (with your team in mind) in order to get the most important work done. It is a way to prioritize and organize your day to day, keeping an overview of your short term plans.

At work, we usually have a crazy amount of small tasks that demand our attention. So many, that at the end of the day we can hardly remember what we accomplished, or what we even did 30 minutes prior, let alone the beginning of the day!

To be honest, I have tried to get into a rhythm of weekly planning, but the hard part is keeping up the habit. I would often get bored of the process, or more likely, just forget about it. As a result, my default to life has always been to live reactively and never proactively.

As an entrepreneur, this is a quick path to burnout and or business failure. This is not my first business, and I can share from personal experience that reactivity is no way to grow a healthy business.

I have two calendars, one is for my corporate client work, and the other is for personal and my coaching business. So I look across those two calendars and block off any appointments, commitments, meetings and events first in my main calendar.

I like to block my time in big chunks. I typically block off morning/early afternoon for creative time. This is where I script and record my podcasts and youtube because my brain is nice and fresh. In the afternoon, I schedule a block of time for admin tasks which then plan in Notion.

Last week, I had the beautiful opportunity to spend a day on retreat with 14 alumnae of the Mindful Return program. We spent time connecting, journaling, networking, doing yoga, and brainstorming logistical strategies that make working mama life easier. It was good to get away and give ourselves some quiet space simply to be.

For me and my husband, our weekly meeting started at a point of sheer desperation after our second child was born, and the kids were getting sick more often than we could keep track of. (It was the year that 1 child + 1 child felt like 85 children.) Now, with 5 and 7 year olds, things are less dire. But the weekly meeting is still incredibly helpful, and we really feel discombobulated when, for whatever reason, we happen to skip it.

At Mindful Return, we know that calm, thoughtful planning, and time for reflection, are keys to success in working parent life. Our FREE guide, 99 Questions to Ask Yourself Before, During, and After Maternity Leave, is our gift to you and your new bundle of joy.

Write out all your to-do items for the week including the short term tasks you need to get done, as well as the strategic tasks associated with your long term research agenda (these should be listed by week in your semester plan). Many of the new faculty members I work with categorize their to-do items under the headings "teaching," "service," "research," and "personal" to quickly assess the relative length of their to-do tasks and to determine whether their lists are aligned with their priorities and how they will be evaluated for promotion and tenure. The purpose of this step is to: 1) reconnect you with your semester plan on a weekly basis, 2) get everything out of your head and onto paper, and 3) to put you in a position to control your week (instead of your week controlling you). The brain dump can cause either relief or anxiety, but no matter how you feel about it in the moment, go on to the next step.

I hope this week brings you the willingness to try a Sunday Meeting, comfort in knowing that you are not alone in having more tasks than time, and the creativity to make conscious decisions that are in line with your priorities.

On Sunday afternoons, while our children play upstairs or outside, we grab a steaming cup of coffee, our laptops and phones, and the calendar. Then we sit down at our weathered kitchen table and run through our weekly Family Meeting.

A career in journalism set Kristin Demery up to publish her own stories of living this wild, precious life. She now is an author of five truth-telling books, including the latest 100 Days of Kindness, and part of a trio of writers collectively known as The Ruth Experience. Kristin served as a newspaper and magazine editor and her work has been featured in a variety of publications, including USA Today. She still works behind-the-scenes as an editor for others while writing her own series on kindness, friendship, and living with intention. Find more from Kristin at theruthexperience.com.

3a8082e126